Saturday, December 17, 2016

...is an excellent film. It may be my new favorite Star Wars film to date.

My brother (who watched the film with me and the boy) is lying on my couch as I type this, muttering to himself "huh, I wasn't expecting that," and other non-sequitur nothings as he tries to wrap his head around what he just experienced. Whereas Episode 7 was a new take on an old plot (a remake of the original) this was a much more mature look at the universe created within the genre. It was more a "war film" than (what is traditionally considered) a "Star Wars film." And, as I've written before, I love me some military sci-fi.

The movie also borrows many of the concepts found in Lucas's original treatment for the first films...ideas that were readily discarded as the script morphed into a space version of Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress.

[see Michael Kaminski's wonderful "The Secret History of Star Wars" for details]

Anyway, I'd write more, but it would include spoilers. Plus, I have a lot of other things to write about besides Star Wars, including other cinema offerings (for example, Moana may be the best Disney film I've seen since Beauty and the Beast. It doesn't have the single, show-stopping "power song" Frozen gave us with Let it Go, but the overall excellence is far more consistent and the story and animation are tremendous. Dwayne Johnson is but one of Moana's many pleasant surprises).

So that's all I'll say for now. My kid called it "a great film," and there wasn't much of anything in the show that pandered to kids. But as far as a magical, kid-like fantasy universe? Yeah. In that regard, this may be the best Star Wars film yet made.